Love letters from France deserve an amorous reply

The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday February 11 2007 In the article below we state that 'our' age of criminal responsibility is 10. This is true for England and Wales, but not for Scotland, where it is eight.

When the French choose a new President three months from now, they will pick one of two candidates. In reality, the choice is narrower. Whether the name on the ballot paper is Nicolas Sarkozy or Segolene Royal, electors will be casting their vote for Britain.

Both candidates are in thrall to the Anglo-Saxon success story. Our vibrant economy is so enviable that Sarkozy last week brought his campaign to London, urging expatriates to come home and promising that full employment was possible. This 'eloge du Blairisme', as Le Monde calls it, has startled both countries.

The entente will be news to those Parisian waiters who appear to subscribe to Joan of Arc's desire to 'bouter les Anglais hors de France'. Far from wishing to apply the boot, Sarkozy wants to embrace all things British. From where the Brits are sitting (which, for 600,000 of them, maybe in their Gallic homes), it seems unthinkable that the French are casting lascivious glances at our creaking health system, rubbish schools, thrombotic motorways and rotten railways.

French politicians have rarely been so polite about British counterparts. Mitterrand's view that Margaret Thatcher had 'the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe' was oblique praise. Jacques Chirac's view of Blair as 'badly brought up' and 'arrogant' was less equivocal, though not half as rude as many UK citizens' view of their Prime Minister.

What underpins both Sarkozy's and Royal's Blairophilia is 'l'emploi'. Once the invalid of Europe, Britain is a high-growth country whose unemployment vastly undercuts France's 8.6 per cent. With only a third of over-50s in full-time work and 23 per cent of young people jobless, the social model seems near collapse.

Sarkozy has to be careful about offering hymns to Thatcherite market practices, but he can safely say recovery is all about hard work. Whether anyone is listening is more debatable. On the day of his Downing Street love-in, the French health ministry called for a state-backed siesta to allow workers better to digest their cassoulet before returning to their 35 hours of weekly toil.

To the desktop sandwich-munchers of Britain, such indolence is part of Gallic charm. If French presidential hopefuls overstate Britain's greatness, then the UK weaves just as many myths round France. Not long ago, it had little to offer the average Brit, beyond duty-free Amstel and 200 Silk Cut. The Frankophobic Sun took issue with a nation intent on blocking our lamb exports ('Hop off, you Frogs') and ensnaring us in its federalist net ('Up yours, Delors.'). And then a fleece-clad British diaspora set forth to buy up the Dordogne and enjoy free education, premium health care, communitarian values and the stylish example of Chanel-clad women with 12 sorts of thigh cream to ward off cellulite. The truth is that in Ambridge-les-Deux-Eglises, the Jean de Florette peasantry of the British imagination mutters darkly about monolingual incomers and English plumbers while, in the banlieues, juvenile car-torchers bear witness to a country prone to ostracise its poor and its minorities.

If France was really Utopia, then 300,000 young people would not have migrated to Britain. According to Le Monde, London is now the republic's seventh largest city. There is nothing especially new about this trade in culture and lifestyle. In That Sweet Enemy, a history of Franco-British links, Robert and Isabelle Tombs point up the symbiosis. Monet was almost as keen on Thames fogscapes as he was on waterlilies, Rimbaud wrote English primers and Emile Zola's Nana, the story of a French courtesan, sold 200,000 copies in Britain. Long before the arrival of olde English pubs serving Watney's, 19th-century Paris taverns offered oxtail soup, mince pies and sherry. Some ties are closer than ever. A Frenchman, Arsene Wenger, has transformed English football, while our neighbours have quite forgotten that Britain, the Lucrezia Borgia of the EU, was going to poison them all with mad-cow disease.

We shall never embrace our neighbours' privacy laws and they will forever spurn our processed cheese slices. But we are both old colonisers with delusions of grandeur and a nuclear deterrent we should relinquish. Our populations and economies are much of a size. The difference is that on both sides of the Channel, everyone is talking up Britain's wealth-creation and assuming that statist France is a basket case. Both Sego, on the left, and Sarko, from the right, believe that rebirth begins at Dover. Royal, hamstrung by inexperience and a lack of big ideas, is slithering in the polls. Sarko, nine points ahead on 35 per cent, looks suddenly secure.

Before the vote is cast and the ancient regime comes crashing down, consider two examples of French prowess. The first is its birth rate: 830,900 babies were born last year and the fertility rate, at 1.98 children per woman, puts France way ahead of Britain on 1.79. No wonder. French working mothers get generous maternity leave and pre-school care ranges from free to cheap. On last week's Daycare Trust figures, British parents are now paying up to £19,000 a year, up 30 per cent in six years.

The second talisman is French youth justice. Our age of criminal responsibility is 10; theirs is 13. They have juges d'enfants who aim to educate children, not to jail them. Our 'respect agenda' feeds a custodial system that incubates despair; 29 children have died in custody since 1990, and the number of 15 to 17-year-olds has doubled in 10 years. The vast majority reoffend. And that is partly why we have 80,000 people in jail while the French have 52,000.

In future, Britain will need to work more closely with the French on climate change, African poverty, the Middle East and much else. Sarkozy, despite his homage to Britishness, is likely to make co-operation harder. If an anti-immigrant populist and social conservative becomes President, and his bandwagon looks difficult to stop, he may well throw out the better parts of France's heritage along with the Gaullist deadwood that has to go. Far from being flattered by his visit, Britain should beware. It should also cherry-pick France's more humane policies before it is too late.

The French, never keen to fudge tough decisions, once beheaded their king and strung their aristocrats from lampposts. Expect Sarko, the Eurostar Robespierre, to wield the guillotine on social enlightenment.